The Duty of the IState to the Insane, etc. 29 



rank, based on wealth, and on freedom from the restraints of law 

 and labor; a condition of things best calculated to deteriorate what 

 there is good in any generation of men. If the doctrine is true, 

 that the fittest only should live, then it follows as a rational corol- 

 lary that, in a society of rational men, where the interests of a race 

 capable of indefinite development are blended, that " the fittest 

 only should be born," To reproduce and fill the world with pos- 

 terity is not always a duty. Certainly not always a privilege. 

 The law makes it a crime where the parties have not taken the 

 legal steps to provide, as far as may be for the protection, the edu- 

 cation and general wellbeing of future offspring. Why should 

 not the law adopt the sound maxim, that no person has the right 

 to throw upon the charities of the world, his diseased, deformed 

 and insane offspring. 



The laws of generation are now sufficiently well established so 

 that good scientific and medical authority can determine with 

 tolerable certainty the probable issue of a given marriage, so far 

 as health is concerned. Yet, even this generation continues to in- 

 troduce into the world, children marked with these congenitial 

 defects, as if it were a matter of the slightest concern whether 

 children were well or ill born. Society should here erect an im- 

 passable barrier, so that no person, man or woman, who failed to 

 present the requisite credentials of a sound mind in a sound body, 

 free from all forms of congenital and organic disease, no matter 

 what social standing or wealth might distinguish them, should 

 become the head of a family of children. This is the aristocracy 

 of nature. No man is well born who inherits the appetite of a 

 drunkard or the feebleness and frailties of a consumptive. ISTo 

 person is ill born who comes into the world with all his mental 

 and physical faculties bright with the bloom of health and vigor. 

 All theories of progress and true social development are useless 

 and abortive unless these ends are first secured. 



But should our legislators see practical difficulties in the way 

 of a system of legislation so radical and revolutionary in the so- 

 cial life and economy of the people as the above programme would 

 indicate, still the least it can do is to introduce these biological 

 remedies to the attention of the public, in the education of the 



